MER Article Challenging the Embargo What impresses one is the will to ignore and reduce the Arabs that still exists in many departments of Western culture, and the unacceptable defeatism among some Arabs that a resurgent religion and indiscriminate hostility are the only answers. — Edward Said (1990) Hosam Aboul-Ela • 9 min read
MER Article Take Them Out of the Ballgame On January 2, 2001, newly elected parliamentary deputy and Muslim Brother Gamal Heshmat submitted an inquiry to Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni concerning the publication by the General Organization for Cultural Palaces (GOCP) of three novels containing what the MP described as "explicitly indecent material amounting to pornography." Samia Mehrez • 15 min read
MER Article Ruminations on Political Violence Texts Reviewed Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996). Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya, eds., What Women Do in Wartime: Amy Zalman • 6 min read
MER Article Women, War and Exile Miriam Cooke, War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse University Press, 1996). May Ghousoub, Leaving Beirut (London: Saqi Books, 1998). Emily Nasrallah, Flight Against Time (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). Anita Vitullo Khoury • 5 min read
MER Article Men, Women and God(s) Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics (California, 1995). Persis M. Karim • 4 min read
MER Article Terrorism, Class and Democracy in Egypt During April 1994, armed actions of the radical Islamist opposition in Egypt achieved a new level of lethal efficiency. One Gama‘a Islamiyya (Islamic Group) hit squad killed Maj. Gen. Ra’uf Khayrat, who was responsible for conducting undercover operations against them; another assassinated the chief Joel Beinin • 5 min read
MER Article Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature Edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 744 pages. Salah Hassan • 3 min read
Marxism and Postmodernism During the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era, just as critical intellectuals and left political activists had won a small place for the concepts of political economy and class analysis in academia, postmodernism and post-structuralism replaced Marxism as the favored mode of Anglo-American intellectual radica Joel Beinin • 8 min read
MER Article Is the "Fatwa" a Fatwa? In saluting author Salman Rushdie and expressing solidarity with his plight, I would like to put on the table the question of whether the notorious “fatwa” issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Rushdie is really a fatwa in the first place. This is neither an academic exercise nor a purely theoretical Sadiq al-Azm • 3 min read
MER Article Layoun and Boullata Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, 1990). Issa Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (SUNY, 1990). Saree Makdisi • 4 min read
MER Article Binder, Islamic Liberalism Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988). Sami Zubaida • 6 min read
MER Article War and Sexuality The Gulf way may ultimately transform Arab politics even more radically than the political-military defeats of 1948 and 1967. Those experiences were the midwives of self-critical reassessments that, while severe, accepted the fundamental legitimacy of Arab nationalism and its political project. In t Joel Beinin • 4 min read
